Disruption: A River Of Secrets And Betrayal

by J. B. Jamison

  "Cap', can we talk?"

  Smitty had apparently been appointed to speak for the group, most likely because he was Charlie's cousin, but also because he was easy to put in situations others didn’t want to be in themselves. He was an outstanding engineer, but had trouble with most everything else in life; because of the booze.

  "Well, hell, it looks like we're going to whether I say its ok or not. What's on your minds?"

  Smitty glanced at the six men standing behind him, then looked at the floor.

  "Well, Cap, we want to know when we're, uh, when the hell we're going to do something...about these assholes on our boat?"

  There were nods and grunts of agreement from the others, which gave Smitty a bit more courage to stand up straighter and almost look Charlie in the eye.

  "Do something? And just what did you guys have in mind?"

  "Shit captain, we've been talking, and we can't just sit here and let these guys blow things up."

  It was another crewman, Roosevelt Phelps, born and raised in bayou country.

  "Ok, Mr., Phelps, just what do you suggest that we do?", the Captain looked him in the eyes.

  The deckhand shuffled his feet, "Hell captain, I don't know. But we just gotta do something here, ya'll know that."

  "I'll tell you what I'm by god gonna do.” It was Ricky Pratt, a seven-year deckhand from the diamond country of Arkansas. “I'm gonna go out and cut this fucking bracelet thing off my arm and throw the son of a bitch in the river. I feel like some kind of fucking prisoner wearing this thing."

  The group started slapping backs and saying other things they were going to do to end this mess on their boat. One voice was heard to say, ‘with or without your help!’ They became quiet as that voice echoed through the pilothouse. The Captain was not a man you dare to threaten, even lightly; ever. Most boats on the river carried someone who could tell stories of what happened when they had challenged Captain Charlie Graff. None of those stories were pretty.

  As the group braced for the explosion, Charlie looked each man in the eye, slowly reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out the photo, held it in front of them and said, "And what about this?"

  Every man unconsciously moved their hand over the pocket that held their photo.

  "Look, do you think I don't want to stop this bullshit? You think I'm sitting up here pretending it’s not happening? Fuck. This is my goddamned boat they're on, going to blow up my god damn river."

  Charlie looked out the front window to make sure the boat was still in the channel and then turned back.

  "We'll stop the sons a bitches. Nobody climbs on a boat filled with a bunch of hard-assed, good for nothing river-rats like us and gets away with it. That shit just isn't going to happen."

  A few nods and smiles appeared.

  "But listen, and listen carefully. We have to be smart. These guys are not stupid. We can't just run out there and make some half-assed move."

  He paused.

  "But we've got time. They plan to drop these things under every bridge on the river before blowing any of them up. I don’t know if they’re headed to Cincinnati or Minneapolis, but hell, you know as well as I do it’s going to take almost two weeks to get this boat to either of those. So get your heads out of your asses. We will do something. I don't know what yet, but we'll figure it out."

  It worked. The group was holding photos in their hands and nodding their agreement. Once again, the Captain had demonstrated he had the balls for this job.

  "Now get the hell out of my pilothouse. Get back to work or get back in the sack...whatever. But use the brains that God gave you and do your jobs. As long as we're moving this boat up river, we've got time. All we have to do is find the right opportunity. But for now, just do your jobs."

  The group moved toward the door as Charlie said, "Smitty, hang around a second."

  Each man gave Smitty a look as they left him behind, feeling guilty for setting him up to be the fall guy like this. But the Captain seemed to be in a decent mood, so maybe Smitty would be ok.

  "Charlie, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to cause any..."

  "Smitty, god damn it, man. When are you going to remember to use your head?"

  "I know."

  "You can't let those guys set you up like that. How many times has that happened? That's how you got yourself thrown off of your last two boats, remember?"

  "Yeah, I know. I don't know Charlie, I just..."

  "And I'm not always going to be around to save your ass. I was able to get you hired on here by telling them I'd keep an eye on you. I tell you, Smitty, that booze has fucked up your brain."

  Silence. Smitty was a great guy, with a great heart, and worked harder than any three other men. But Charlie understood that something was broken inside. He didn't know what started it, but he knew that the past thirty years of alcohol had done the damage. Even if he hadn’t been a cousin, he was the kind of guy Charlie just couldn’t help but want to take care of.

  "Listen, Smitty, you meant well, I get that. We both want to do something to stop these bastards. But like I told the others, we have to be smart about this, and we can't just start raising hell. Understand?"

  "Yeah, I understand."

  "Tell me something, when did you have your last drink?"

  Smitty looked him in the eyes, "I had a couple the night before coming back on the boat."

  "Nothing since?"

  "Hell no Charlie, you know I wouldn't bring nothing on the boats. I wouldn't do that."

  "I know, I know."

  Both men looked briefly out the window.

  "I'll tell you one thing you can do for me, Smitty."

  Smitty nodded his head.

  "You know this boat better than any man on it. I want you to think about something."

  "Ok, Charlie."

  "At some point, if I ask you to stop this boat, I mean really stop it so that they can't get it running again, I want you to think about how you might go about doing that."

  Smitty nodded and smiled.

  "Don't blow it up, or sink it, nothing like that. But if we want to just put things out of commission for at least a few weeks, think about how you might do that."

  "I'll do that Charlie, I really will. You want something that's really fast?"

  "Yeah, Something they won't have time to stop if we do it."

  "Roger skipper, I can do it."

  "I know Smitty. Now go on back to bed, and we'll talk more in the morning."

  "Night skipper."

  Smitty walked from the pilothouse like a man with a purpose. Charlie hoped he did enough to stop any more thoughts that might get them, or their families, blown all to hell.

  He had long forgotten about cheeseburgers.

  Chapter 29

  As an FBI agent, Emily had been in many situations you would call dangerous, but none of them had been as high risk as her drive back to the river tonight. Later, she would remember nothing between hanging up the phone on Lennie and arriving at the blockade. She would apologize for hanging up on him. She knew he was going to tell her to go home. He understood that Elliott’s death would make this thing personal, and that was something the Bureau frowned on. Personal emotions could interfere with an agent's focus, so when personal and professional lives intersected, questions arose. So after saying she was on her way, she gave Lennie no time for discussion, but she knew it would come. She also knew there was no way anyone is going to take her off of this case regardless of any bureau policy. One way or the other, she was going to do her job and track these assholes down to see that they paid for what they had done.

  Chapter 30

  Things had clearly changed at the river. Emily found the new barricade at the intersection a mile from the river. She saw the long lines of traffic heading north as the people within that mile were under forced evacuation orders. She wondered if this was just precautionary, or if the radiation was really loose.

  After showing her badge, she followed a sheriff's deputy through the emptying streets
of Gramercy to the new incident command center in the parking lot of an old factory, about a half mile from the bridge and outside of the mandatory 500-meter secure range. Another time she might have been concerned about the various industrial contaminants that were most likely covering the ground here, but tonight, it didn’t even cross her mind.

  She joined the group from the second boat now gathered in a big van. Everyone was staring at screens, re-watching the video from the submersible, looking for a clue as to just what had happened. As they restarted it once again, there was no evidence that the submersible had touched the device. Data showed no magnetic fields, radio waves or other sensors the robot may have triggered.

  There were others here too, including a new team from the NRC response group who specialized in deconstructing events like this. They usually referred to it as conducting an event post-mortem, but the first time one of them had used that term tonight it was made very clear the term would not be used again. They hadn't meant to sound insensitive to the loss of life, but their responsibility was to figure out what the hell had just happened to make sure that more lives aren’t lost. It wasn't that they didn't care that men had died. It was that they cared so much that their focus was intentionally very narrow; to find the exact steps that led to the detonation.

  The group turned away from the screens and pulled their chairs together into a little circle.

  "Ok, what do we know at this point?"

  Tracy Daniels was the head of the decon group. It was her job to pull the best ideas out of the entire group and help them find their best answer. She was smart and knew how to dig in muddy and messy situations and find gold.

  "This is a good one. It’s like they built this thing to do its job, but also to make sure that if anyone found it first, they would never get a chance to take a good look at it."

  "Yeah, and that took some effort. This wasn't put together in somebody's garage." Will Bracken was lead of one of the decon teams.

  The conversation began peeling back the layers of the onion they were dealing with, and Tracy kept pulling them back to the primary question for the moment; why did the thing detonate?"

  The final hypothesis was that since the detonation appeared to have taken place at the moment the X-ray device was turned on, it must have been the X-rays themselves that triggered the explosion. This was unique and would have taken some time and effort. Whatever this device was designed to do, it was also designed to protect itself very well, and if it felt threatened, to destroy itself and the chance of someone getting a close look at it.

  "I think we agree that the main thing we need to stress," Tracy began wrapping up, "is that whoever designed and built this thing has some serious expertise. We'll learn more if we can find enough pieces to model it, but like Will said, this is not somebody's garage or basement project."

  "What are you suggesting agent Daniels?"

  Pete Goodwin was still the lead NRC agent in charge of the incident, though everyone knew that was about to change.

  Tracy Daniels stood and turned to him, "I think it is safe to say a few things, sir. First, that this is not the work of some loner wanting to make a point or get attention. There are too many areas of expertise involved. Second, to have that level of expertise requires several people with advanced understanding and skills in some rather unique fields, and you don't find a lot of those people around. Third, considering the extreme steps they took to keep the devices from being inspected; we have to ask why someone would take such extreme measures to keep that a secret."

  "Unless..."

  It was Will again.

  "Unless what?" Both Pete Goodwin and Tracy Daniels turned to face the young man still sitting in the circle.

  "Unless it’s not the only one."

  He had everyone’s attention. Emily found herself pushing toward the circle.

  "Unless they wanted to make sure we didn't get lucky and disarm this one, so we could then find out how to disarm others. I mean, that's how I would do it."

  Pete Goodwin's phone interrupted the silence. He listened to the report from the tactical team that stopped Joey Santiago, stuck the phone back in his pocket and rubbed his forehead.

  "It wasn't the truck. The device didn't come from the truck."

  Several conversations began at once. Agent Goodwin raised a hand in the air and quieted things down.

  "So, let's see if I understand this,” Goodwin said. “We have a device; one that had to be created by very special people with very special skills, and who want to keep us from getting a good look at it, because they may have more of these things out there somewhere. And this one didn't come from the truck that we thought dropped it. So, we still don't know where the hell the thing came from. Is that what I'm hearing?"

  He wasn't really looking for an answer, so no one offered one.

  "Sir," Goodwin's number two asked, "earlier we put teams on call to scan under a couple of other bridges, like Hale Boggs and Huey Long, do you want us to send them in now, just to make sure..."

  "No, no, not now. We only found this one because it was cracked. And we can't send teams in there if these things are set to blow up if they're found. We need to know more first. Tell those teams to hold for now. Ok people, it’s time to escalate. Renshaw, get Washington on the line. Agent Graham, you need to notify your people that the FBI is now in charge of this investigation. Good luck."

  Chapter 31

  Frank went on watch as the boat passed the Plaquimine Ferry Landing, or the Sunshine Ferry landing, depending on which side of the river you were on. The ferry didn’t run between seven in the evening and eight in the morning, so the only thing he had to keep an eye on was the stack of barges tied up on the eastern side of the river. Frank smiled as he guided the boat, thinking of the reasons he wanted to be a pilot in the first place. Not just anybody could do this. If you missed a step, even for a second or two, you could end up knocking the barges loose from the shore, or let your tow drift from the channel and end up ass deep in the mud, or you could really screw the pooch and hit that other boat, leading to phone calls and lawyers really messing up your night. Every pilot made a mistake now and then, but the really good ones avoided the mistakes that left too many dents and bruises.

  While Frank drove the boat, the activity at Grammercy Bridge staging area continued. After making the necessary calls, Colonel Goodwin, Agent Renshaw, and Emily Graham headed home for a few hours of sleep. Their people knew how to do their jobs, so they took the time needed to get ready for what was sure to be a long morning. Sleep did not come easily. They each lay in their beds running the images from the video screen through their heads, and hearing the same words over and over again, ‘Unless it’s not the only one.’

  As Emily finally drifted into sleep, Frank was keeping one eye on the small cabin cruiser approaching from the western bank near the Union Petro plant. He stepped out onto the gangway to watch it pull near enough to transfer the two devices to the doctor's crew. As he stepped back inside, the radar was just revealing the echo of the I-10 Horace Wilkinson Bridge at Baton Rouge.

  At the Grammercy staging area, the teams were reviewing the initial reports from those investigating the impact of the explosion. It was far better news than anyone had anticipated. There was no visible structural damage to the bridge or its supports. The river channel had been messed up a bit, but the Corps of Engineers would be able to bring in a dredge and clean that up. But the best news came as NRC Agent O'Donnel described the early results of the radiation studies.

  "We haven't found anything more than the small traces we saw before the explosion. It has spread out a lot more of course with the blast, but the levels are actually lower because of being spread out like that. Apparently, the detonation was a lot weaker than it was supposed to be, probably because of the damage we saw to the device before the detonation. Instead of being powerful enough to rupture the canisters containing the radioactive materials, it just distributed those canisters intact, not dispersing radiation. We h
ave found two of those canisters, one underwater near the blast, and one on the side of the levee. From the size of the device, we are guessing there may be two or three more canisters still out there somewhere. But again, none of them appear to have dispersed their contents, so it appears that we have reasonable containment at this time."

  The smile on Emily's face was not because of the good news at the meeting but was from the waves lapping against her toes as she sat on the beach, holding a cold margarita and staring at the sunset. It was a recurring dream, and one she never regretted. Normally, as the sun lowered itself into the water, she looked up at the stars and listened to Jimmy Buffett singing Margaritaville as he stood next to her there in the sand. But tonight, instead of singing Margaritaville, Jimmy was playing some stupid instrument that was making some really irritating buzzing sound, ruining the entire mood. As she turned to ask him what the hell he was doing, the light from the phone hit her optic nerve, and her brain began yelling, ‘PHONE!’. She raised it to see the caller ID displaying Torchwood. The clock on the phone said three o'clock as she swiped the button.

  "Hello." She said halfheartedly.

  "Hey Emmy, it’s dad."

  What struck her first was that it actually sounded like her father.

  "Dad?"

  "Hey, I'm really sorry about earlier, I know you were just trying to help. I just don't know what happened. They said I hit someone; is that true?"

  "Yeah, I guess so dad. That's what they told me."

  "Shit. I honestly don't remember any of that at all. I just don't know what the hell is going on anymore; I just don't know."

  "It’s ok dad, they all understand. Before I left you were all in there telling stories and eating ice cream, so it’s not a problem."

  The fog continued to lift from her mind as she focused on the first real conversation with him in weeks.

  "I know, it’s not a problem for them, yeah, ok. But I just don't know how much more of this I can take. I just don't know what's going to happen..."